I always loved the design of the old ‘cheese-grater‘ Mac Pro, and computer storage company Akitio has used it as the inspiration for its new Thunderbolt 3 drive enclosure.

The company says that the Akitio Thunder3 Quad X was designed for use with the MacBook Pro. The previous version – which had a more generic design – did not support Macs …

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The Quad X holds four drives and can accommodate either 3.5″ hard drives, 2.5″ hard drives or solid state drives (SSD’s). The Quad X was designed for use with the new 2016/2017 Apple MacBook Pro lineup.

It’s particularly geared to those working with high-res video.

“The Quad X is our third macOS compatible enclosure and will be especially useful for anyone dealing with large amounts of data such as 4K and 8K uncompressed video files,” said Richard Wright, VP of Sales & Marketing for Akitio. “The Thunder3 Quad X is extremely affordable and will allow users to better store, transfer, save, protect, and edit their creative content while also freeing up valuable space on their computers.”

The unit supports transfer speeds of up to 1375 MB/s while simultaneously providing two 4K video streams to connected displays. It also supports daisy-chaining of TB3 devices.

Two Thunderbolt 3 Ports and a DisplayPort video output to connect to the latest 4K 60Hz displays while also supporting Power Delivery (PD) up to 27W. The second Thunderbolt 3 port on the Thunder3 Quad X operates the same as a Thunderbolt 3 computer port by supporting Thunderbolt 3 (up to 5 daisy chained), as well as allowing users to connect USB Type-C devices (10Gb/s) such as external hard drives, and DisplayPort monitors.

The device supports TB3 Power Deliver, supplying 27w of power to Macs and other connected devices that support the TB3-PD standard.

About the Author

Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!